Agreed. There's reddit and on the other end there's pinterest. Both of those work in their context, but this nytimes redesign is skeuomorphism and all that's missing is the fake paper background image. As someone else points out it's probably because of all the older, stagnant people who expect newspapers to look like this. If these types of people listened to music online you'd probably see spotify's UI look like a record or tape player. I qualify older with stagnant because as I'm getting older I'm aware that it's not so much about age than a common laziness and reluctance to deal with an ever increasing pace of innovation. And that reluctance affects us all because it comes with scams, toolbars, shitty ads and botnets.
Really? I don't see that at all. This redesign looks nothing like a newspaper to me. The closest I can see to any newspaper metaphor is the left/right navigation to switch between stories, which really is nothing like how I switch stories in a physical newspaper.
The front page seems much the same, content-wise, but the article view is dramatically improved from a usability standpoint. The switch to single-page is a fantastic change in and of itself.
I'm interested to see if the new top nav and right/left experience does a better job of providing me with a curated news experience, which is one of the things that I really miss in most online news sources. The Economist's iPhone app pulls this off pretty well; I hope this helps highlight the editor's role for nytimes.com.
laziness, reluctance & stagnation are ways of looking at it. I think it's a misconception.
The idea persists that computers and the internet are peripheral to people's lives. Once upon a time, computers were devices purchased to expedite or enhance analog activities. This is no longer true.
As long as you're employed in a 'developed' country, your existence is mediated by computers. You depend on networks and there is no avoiding them or living without them. The difficulty in recognizing this is that the change happened gradually - there was no one moment when suddenly the whole world went digital. We still have analog brains that live in a world built while computers were enormous calculators. At the core, though, is pride. The idea that something is lost when you use a computer, that you took the easy route instead of buckling down and doing something "yourself". It's a problem of perspective.
I agree however that until you've shaken the misconception, you can become a target for people who have. That's the digital divide.
